Building customer trust through screenshot automation

Company

Tallyfy is on a mission to make the world more productive through simpler workflow automation. They help businesses to improve the predictability and scalability of their operations through the templatization of repeatable processes.

Industry

Software

Key Features

Login Profile, Recipe Builder, Custom Styling, R2 Storage integration, Export to storage bucket, Automated annotation, Embedding with custom domain.

Overview

Recognizing the impact their help documentation has on driving increased customer success, Tallyfy embarked on an overhaul of their existing help center. As part of this overhaul, the team identified outdated product screenshots in their help articles as an area of concern and a potential point of customer friction, making the modernization of their manual process an urgent priority.

Challenge

Like most software companies today, Tallyfy employs a continuous development philosophy shipping updates to their product multiple times a week. And, often, daily.

Before LaunchBrightly, the process for creating product screenshots to include in their help documentation was a manual one. An endless loop of signing into their dedicated demo account for screenshots. Navigating to the product URL and feature in question. Priming the feature to display items like a dropdown or adding text to an input box for illustration purposes, and finally using the built-in MacOS screenshot feature to manually capture the screenshot. Then, for most screenshots, adding annotation using the Macbook Preview tool, searching for the relevant help article and dragging that final PNG image from the desktop into the help article.

The output lacked consistency across team members. And making it worse. The team was spending endless hours creating, and updating, screenshots only to see those manual screenshots slowly grow stale each time an update was shipped to the product.

“Given our product velocity, it was impossible to keep screenshots for documentation up-to-date”, says Tallyfy CEO, Amit Kothari. “Like most, dedicating resources to reviewing and updating screenshots after every single product update was just not feasible. We simply had to accept that our help documentation would inevitably include outdated screenshots.”

Given our product velocity, it was impossible to keep screenshots for documentation up-to-dateAmit, CEO of Tallyfy

The product screenshots in your help content are one of the first cues your customers will use to determine if they have landed in the right place to answer their question. They quickly convey what the article is helping them resolve, and make your content more engaging. Amit and the team could see that outdated product screenshots were leading customers to leave help articles without reviewing the written content, and driving them to contact customer support for a resolution to the issue they were trying to solve through the help center.

When the support team stopped including help article links in their responses to customer tickets because of outdated screenshots, it was simply too much. Amit and his team needed a way to keep their product screenshots up-to-date to help drive an improvement in the engagement of their help center, and to avoid losing customer trust.

Solution

Tallyfy set out to create an automation recipe for each of the hundreds of screenshots needed in their documentation. Using LaunchBrightly’s intuitive screenshot recipe builder, they were able to meticulously record the steps to capture each of their ideal screenshots - from clicking buttons, adding input text, removing specific elements, to adding precise annotations. This allows them to create automated screenshot sequences that can be run repeatedly in the future, generating up-to-the-minute screenshots of the latest version of the product.

It was such a relief to be able to reprocess ALL of my screenshots with the click-of-a-buttonEdgar, Implementation Specialist at Tallyfy

As part of the setup, Tallyfy’s screenshot specialist, Edgar Modesto, created a custom styling template according to Tallyfy’s brand guidelines to ensure that all of the automated product screenshots generated would be on-brand and consistent. However, midway through the implementation, the foundational color of the app changed. Ordinarily, this would have required a project restart to revisit those previously created manual screenshots but with LaunchBrightly’s screenshot automation Edgar could simply move forward knowing any previously set screenshot recipes could be regenerated at any time without fuss.

With over 250 screenshot automation recipes set, it was time to decide how best to best take advantage of these new future-proof screenshots. Tallyfy decided to use LaunchBrightly’s export functionality to copy each of their automated screenshots across to a Cloudflare R2 bucket they control. Allowing them to add a custom domain to their screenshot URLs for an added SEO boost, as well as enhanced branding and consistency, when embedding those URLs directly into their help center.

"Setting up our Cloudflare storage integration was easy! We just added a dedicated token for our R2 bucket and were able to continuously see all of our screenshots copied over (exported)", Edgar says.

The screenshot automation platform will now save a copy of the latest version of the screenshots to Tallyfy’s Cloudflare bucket. Screenshots are saved under the same folder and filename each time and will be continuously overwritten. This allows Edgar and the team to confidently use these owned screenshot URLs in their help center, knowing they will always remain the same while serving the most up-to-date version of the product screenshot.

Finally, Tallyfy has set up recurring screenshot audits to maintain full control over their automated screenshots. Each audit performs a visual comparison between the most recent and previously generated screenshots. This allows Tallyfy to quickly identify any changes and easily accept or reject them. Not only giving them screenshot automation, but also an ongoing process for screenshot governance.

The Outcome

Since deploying LaunchBrightly’s screenshot automation platform, Tallyfy has created hundreds of automated screenshot recipes, and plans to create hundreds more. The generated screenshots are embedded directly in their new help center, serving the most up-to-date versions of their screenshots. This not only puts them in a strong position to take advantage of screenshot automation into the future. But it also allowed Tallyfy to expedite the launch of their new help center with consistently styled, and fully up-to-date product screenshots.

Tallyfy were able to make several adjustments to their styling templates to ensure their screenshots exactly match the style they want, and reflect other styling decisions made as part of the overall help center upgrade. This was only possible using screenshot automation, and the ability to easily reprocess all of their screenshots at any time.

“It was such a relief to be able to reprocess ALL of my screenshots with the click-of-a-button!” Edgar says, “Manually updating hundreds of screenshots for our style change would have been a multiple-week endeavor had it not been for LaunchBrightly’s automation recipes. This is a true game changer in my job.”

Inevitably there were also several product updates that would have affected ordinarily manual screenshots throughout the multi-month help center overhaul Tallyfy undertook. With the ability to reprocess all of their screenshot recipes right before the launch of the help center, Tallyfy were able to experience a delight few, until now, ever have - entirely fresh and fully up-to-date screenshots in their help center.

“It felt like having a cheat code being able to automatically reprocess all of our screenshots right before launch”, Amit said.

It felt like having a cheat code being able to automatically reprocess all of our screenshots right before launch!Amit, CEO of Tallyfy

Tallyfy has set the LaunchBrightly Scheduler to reprocess all screenshots and run an audit every two weeks, receiving automatic alerts whenever a product change affects one of the screenshots. This has allowed the team to save countless hours each week in manual tracking and maintenance of screenshots, elevating their documentation maintenance in addition to seeing an improvement in key help center engagement metrics like bounce rate and average time on page.

“With automatic alerts we can finally do away with that dedicated Slack channel for product changes! It never quite worked as well as we hoped despite our good intentions”, Amit says. “Even better - knowing our screenshots will automatically be updated every two weeks means I no longer have to worry about customers coming across outdated screenshots in our help center!”

We'd love to show you how this works in real life, so feel free to shoot us an email at hello@launchbrightly.com — OR just steal some time on our calendar. 🤗

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